Qiao Shi's 1989 East European Visit

A riveting account of Qiao Shi's (pictured, be-spectacled) visit to East Europe in 1989 and the rever-berations felt in Beijing thereafter can be found in David Shambaugh’s book China’s Communist Party Atrophy and Adaptation (Woodrow Wilson Centre Press, 2008).

Shambaugh wrote that the Chinese media was silent about the events sweeping East Germany in 1989 as well as the Hungarian renunciation of communist rule on 7th October.

In order to examine the situation closer and urge the remaining communist governments in Eastern Europe to “hold the line”, China dispatched Politburo Standing Committee member and internal security/intelligence czar Qiao to assess the situation in Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia.

Qiao never made it to Prague because two days into his trip to Bulgaria, the Czech government voted to end the Communist Party’s guaranteed monopoly on power.

"Thereafter, a prolonged period of significant strain emerged in relations between Prague and Beijing as the new Czech government under dissident-turned-president Vaclav Havel embraced the causes of Tibetan and Taiwanese independence and became an ardent critic of the CCP.”

However, the centerpiece of Qiao’s trip was said to be Romania. There, he attended the 14th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party, and met with the Romanian leader Nicolai Ceausescu, said to be “a longtime and stalwart supporter of the CCP.”

Ceausescu reassured Qiao that sometimes “the party and government of a socialist country must take measures to suppress counterrevolutionary rebellion.”

"Within three weeks, Ceausescu would try to heed his own advice, as demonstrators laid siege of the provincial city of Timisora … On Christmas evening, Romanian (and international) television showed the bloody bodies of Ceausescu and his wife Elena lying in the white snow, having been executed by military forces following a coup d’etat.”

"The image, broadcast around the world on CNN, must have shaken the Chinese leaders to their core,” Shambaugh wrote, though on the surface, “they tried to roll with the punch and adapt to the new circumstances."

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman declared the event as an internal matter for Romania and that "China respects the Romanian people’s choice", while President Yang Shangkun and Premier Li Peng sent a telegram of congratulations to their new counterparts.

"Such outward protestations belied, however, the internal alarm felt inside the Zhongnanhai (China’s leadership compound) and outside in Beijing. Chinese leaders responded by tightening security around the capital, setting up roadblocks and checkpoints on all the approaches leading into the center of the city. The tension in Beijing was palpable."

It took one full year before Beijing began to interpret the events in Eastern Europe. Even though Chinese analysts "produced a variegated picture of the multiple reasons" for the collapse of the East European regimes, the immediate assessment pinned the blame on Mikhail Gorbachev. The former Soviet leader was said to have intentionally undermined the East European communist party states, and Jiang Zemin even labeled Gorbachev "a traitor like Trotsky."

It was only during the mid-1990s that more interpretations about the events in Eastern Europe surfaced, and mainly revolved around the following four themes.

1. The deterioration of the economy, high levels of debt, and a poor standard of living.
2. Dictatorships, ruling parties divorced from the populace, and a lack of local-level party building
3. Unions that were not a bridge between the party and the working class; and
4. “Peaceful evolution” efforts by western countries.